Women writing novels on art: ekphrasis in twenty-first century fiction

Twenty-first century literature is marked by a number of authors who engage with visual art in their work, five prime examples being Donna Tartt, Amy Sackville, Hanya Yanagihara, Claire Messud and Siri Hustvedt. Their novels create imaginative spaces where word meets image and where reading blends into seeing. Through ‘ekphrasis’, a descriptive mode of evoking visual art that goes back to Classical Antiquity, these novels disturb automatised patterns of looking, reading, thinking and judging, and encourage a more attentive, critical and ultimately also ethical relationship to contemporary culture. Writing about art is particularly fruitful for women because, as Hilary Fraser puts it, it “enable[s them] to rehearse with greater freedom issues relating not only to the gender politics of their profession and the writing of art’s histories, but to sexuality, visuality and intersubjectivity.” (42) My reading of five contemporary novels – ‘The Goldfinch’ (2013), ‘Painter to the King’ (2018), ‘A Little Life’ (2015), ‘The Woman Upstairs’ (2013) and ‘The Blazing World’ (2014) – further explores these issues by focusing on the nexus of the novel, visual art, ekphrasis and gender. Given their expansive intertextual and re-inscriptive strategies, I analyse these novels alongside other works written by men and women from the nineteenth century onward. By drawing primarily from literary criticism, ekphrasis studies and art history, this interdisciplinary project shows how contemporary Anglo-American women novelists use the work of art as an imaginary site to investigate the frictions between the personal and the political; between the private experiences of selfhood, grief, trauma, abuse and sexism on the one hand, and the public mechanisms of aesthetic value, artistic canon and institutional power on the other. Even though art is often the cause or amplifier of conflict in these novels, it is also offered as an optimistic remedy to these same conflicts. The dynamic genre of the novel – with its sheer length, its unparalleled ability to represent psychological interiority and voice, and its focus on the complex relationship between the individuum and their society – is the ideal artform through which such concerns can be scrutinised. Ekphrasis, whose employment has mostly been researched in poetry, works particularly well within the novel format as it creates patterns and themes that organise these long, complex texts. Ultimately, novels about art are also about the art of the novel. My project is subdivided into five main chapters. Chapter 1 discusses long-held associations of the still work of art with the beautiful and silent woman in Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’ (2013), re-actualising the Pygmalion myth according to feminist strategies. Chapter 2, dedicated to Amy Sackville’s ‘Painter to the King’ (2018), explores how the form of the work of art acts as a template for the form of the novel, enabling it to transgress historical, political and gendered borders to challenge cultural memory. Chapter 3 scrutinises how Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’ (2015) combines graphic depictions of abuse with voyeuristic ekphrases to recode the private experience of suffering into a public issue. Chapter 4 discusses Claire Messud’s ‘The Woman Upstairs’ (2013), which parallels art installations with intertextuality in order to contest confining gender roles for women. Finally, Chapter 5 analyses Siri Hustvedt’s ‘The Blazing World’ (2014) and how its multi-perspectivity imitates the three-dimensional qualities of art installations in order to recreate an aesthetic experience that is biased by gender. This project begins with an Introduction that embeds my research within a theoretical and historical context and it is rounded off by a brief Conclusion that suggests possible avenues for further research.